from the Comments: Inshallah
Posted by Ace on June 3rd, 2011 filed in from the CommentsThe sole extant comment on Year 4, from Nickykaa:
What defines the Interregnum? What has to happen for it to end?
Good questions. I had a hunch somebody was gonna ask me that. Given that I did, one would think I’d have some nice, solid answers ready to go… (Nope.)
Semantically?– all that defines the Interregnum is me saying, “This is the Interregnum.†And all that has to happen for it to end is for me to say, “It’s over.†(<laughs> A certain eye-patched knight in a Jim Henson movie comes to mind…) But whether or not I choose to say those things isn’t arbitrary. That label, and any others I use, are just shorthand ways of summarizing the gestalt of my various internal and external conditions: acknowledgments of What Is, made on my part when the truth of What Is has become sufficiently apparent or impossible to ignore. The labels themselves don’t create the internal and external conditions they describe, or propagate them. (You might be inclined to debate that, of course.)
The HOC era was a good example of that. It started in response to my divorce from Weaver (and a generous gift from Nickykaa), evolved swiftly and organically as I resolved the divorce and began a relationship with Faye, trickled out for a while, rebooted with the ascendance of Myst Online: URU Live, and then terminated in the combined firestorm of Faye leaving me, Uru tanking, my job being over and the stress of it all making me sick. Simple as that. I remember the moment sitting there at the computer when I realized it was done: I had been looking at other people’s sites and seeing how involved and contemporary they felt compared to my own, how much they felt as if they were part of a wider continuum of life and relationships; had read over all my old content, then sat there shaking my head at how ossified and irrelevant the way of thinking that informed it seemed with respect to… everything. Wow, I thought. This is soooo finished. I could have made that same judgment during the drought period right before Uru, and canned the site then; renamed and retooled instead of rebooting. But I didn’t-Â because the underpinnings were still in place, and the mythology was still resonating. The true House had yet to fall.
Qualitatively? I would say the Interregnum is defined by the destruction of that former mythology- by the collapse of my previously held paradigms on how to judge and achieve my own personal success and fulfillment, and my failure to establish any new, enduring paradigms to replace those old ones. I don’t expect to be happy all the time (or even a lot of the time), or not to have to struggle periodically. That would be silly. And my life is not without joys and bright moments: I have (for instance) excellent relationships with both my son and my girlfriend, both of which provide me with lots positive value. I do not, however, feel like things overall are pretty good. Or like the long downward fall which began either three or eight years ago, depending on when you want to start counting, is over and behind me, forever, and I’m not still playing it out. Or that I have a Path I’m on, whatever that is, and that it is the correct path for me: a good one, that won’t ultimately end in disaster. Or that the successes I can achieve are meaningful and sustainable in some reasonable sense, as far as anything can be considered meaningful and/or sustainable. I’d certainly like to feel as if all those things are true. (Again, it’s arguable that some or all of them are true.) But day to day, I don’t really feel that way. I just… don’t.
When I do, the Interregnum is over.
June 3rd, 2011 at 6:47 pm
I was gonna put up one of those awesome Demotivational Posters as the pic for this one, but I figured I’d play it straight. ;)
June 4th, 2011 at 11:10 pm
That all makes perfect sense to me. I’m quite familiar with the experience you’re describing, in myself and in others. I’ve taken to using my friend Antero Alli’s term for it: Chapel Perilous.
June 5th, 2011 at 9:36 pm
Augh, Chapel Perilous. I was there not too long ago. A slow descent into hell that lasted for about five years, and then I woke up.
I hope the Path will make itself aware to you soon.
June 6th, 2011 at 11:20 am
I find all this confusing. There are several ideas in your post that seem independent: a) an outdated website, b) one’s personal mythology, c) paradigms for how to take on life, d) a sub-optimal life or at least feeling it is.
Seems to me that the Interregnum is just about (d).
I don’t know what to think about the term “chapel perilous” after reading about it online. The Wiki entry defines it differently than what you’re writing about, and then other mentions of it online are tough to parse.
I’d like to hear more about Yoko’s slow descent into hell (to the extent it is able to be shared, of course).
June 6th, 2011 at 1:08 pm
Yes, the term Chapel Perilous has been used in different ways by different people over the years, and the Wikipedia entry focuses on a couple of usages that are indeed different from what Ace and Yoko and I are writing about. As I said, I picked up the term from my friend Antero Alli, who originally picked it up from his mentor Robert Anton Wilson (mentioned in the Wikipedia entry) but redefined it, for his own purposes, into something broader and more relevant to the neo-Jungian style of his work.
Here’s a very brief passage on Chapel Perilous from an interview with Antero:
“Someone would know they are in Chapel Perilous in a number of ways. Maybe you might sense that you’re living a lie or a half life, or are haunted by the feeling of missing something but don’t know what. You could be doing all the right things externally and maybe even get approval for it and confirmation from peers, society and teachers, but if you still feel as if life is passing you by, maybe you have taken up residence in the Chapel Perilous. There’s that sense of something missing. Sometimes big chunks of ourselves become invested in a place that is beyond time and space, that has neither here nor there. We are in a kind of extended limbo zone. Chapel Perilous can become its own mythos or metaphor for a shamanic process of soul retrieval, a quest to get yourself back into the realm of the living again.”
June 6th, 2011 at 8:28 pm
I’m not sure how I could explain it any better than I did.
June 6th, 2011 at 10:23 pm
Ace– I’ll say it before, and I’ll say it again: I loved your writing in House of Cards. “Ossified” wouldn’t even be in my lexicon of descriptors for your writing there.
Neuro– it’s actually hard to encapsulate my descent into hell, because there were lots of layers involved. As Nick explained about Chapel Perilous, a lot of my outward life looked fine, great even, and a lot of it *was* good, or was leading to better things, although I didn’t know it at the time. But I wasn’t myself at all. A part of me inside knew it, and yet I kept doing things that were so out of character for me that I lost who I was.
I had to do some spiritual work to reclaim myself (I know that sounds hokey), and in all seriousness, I woke up one day and got reconnected. That’s not to say that everything was happily ever after– I still had a lot of fallout to clean up for a couple years after that, and things aren’t going well in some aspects of my life right now. But I’m not living a lie anymore, and that is a big relief.
June 6th, 2011 at 11:44 pm
Nick, thanks for that Antero Alli quote; I agree that (to me, more interesting) definition does fit well to what is being discussed.
Yoko, thanks. That’s much more internal than I had imagined it. I’m I’ve not gone through anything like that (yet).
Ace, I think you explained it well, I just don’t yet see the necessary connections between a-d. For example, it seems to me that one can have a personal mythology without having any “paradigms on how to judge and achieve…personal success and fulfillment.” And one can have both of those without happiness. I might be confused because, as I read it, a-d are mixed in your discussion as if they are all interchangeable, and that is not how I am thinking of them.
So, to make it clearer for me, if tomorrow you woke up with a new mythology and new paradigms and your life was still suboptimal, would the Interregnum be over? Or, alternately, if your life suddenly became optimal though you had no new paradigms or mythology, would the Interregnum still be in effect?
For my own life, I certainly feel it has had its better and worse periods. But unlike what is being discussed here, I think most of that is due to external conditions and not any deep psycho/spiritual/mythological issues (other than, to some extent, maturation). To be honest, though, I’m not entirely sure.
June 9th, 2011 at 10:41 pm
Hoping to comment further, just been busy with RL stuff…
June 12th, 2011 at 9:16 pm
[…] current events got in the way.  Neuro made some points on a previous From the Comments, Inshallah, that I had to struggle to address in any logically coherent […]